Re: Oracle Style packages on postgres

On 2005-05-11, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> There are a number of issues that would have to be solved to make this
> actually work, but on first glance it seems like a possibly attractive
> idea.
>
> Besides, I can't wait to hear the moans from the newsysviews crew when
> the implications of this sink in ;-) ;-)

I'm not too worried; how many other things assume that schema.tablename
uniquely identifies a table? This is at least as large a change as
adding schemas in the first place.

Obvious strategies include:

- if only one additional nesting level is defined, add a "catalog"
column to match every "schema" column

- if multiple levels are defined, add a "schema_path" column with an
array of names to match every "schema" column.

If schema.tablename becomes non-unique (because this feature was
implemented _and_ someone creates the same schema in different catalogs)
then anything that currently queries the catalogs, whether directly or
via pg_tables (or even information_schema if you allow more than one
additional level) is going to have issues.

--
Andrew, Supernews
http://www.supernews.com - individual and corporate NNTP services